Cantor: Congress done with policy

Serious legislating is all but done until after the election, so House Republicans are left to do little more than position themselves on the so-called fiscal abyss of expiring tax rates, government funding and borrowing limit.

First it was Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who declared that Washington should get to work on the mess of issues that will surface during the lame-duck session, blaming Democrats for fiddling as the nation’s finances worsen.

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Then, in recent weeks, allies of Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) began quietly reminding players in the Capitol that he wasn’t in favor of a grand compromise — he thinks an election is required to solve differences between Democrats and Republicans.

And on Tuesday, Cantor all but predicted 2012 substantively over. The Senate isn’t passing spending bills and is not talking about working to blunt the automatic defense cuts. The two sides remain too far apart on taxes and entitlements. The rest of the year, Cantor said, will likely be about sending “signal[s] that we’ve actually gotten with the reality here, that we have huge problems to deal with.”

In other words, Republicans want to show the direction the GOP will take if it’s in power.

Cantor’s candid comments show how confident he is that his party will not only win House again, but the election will bring a Republican president and GOP Senate. The Virginia Republican said he was “bullish” that Republicans would keep the House and Mitt Romney would win his home state of Virginia.

“I think you take the sort of elements — that redistricting helped us, our candidates … the members in the more swing seats are doing well,” he said.

The comments — delivered to four reporters, in the presence of three aides, over a bowl of M&M’s and pretzel twists — again serve to highlight the heavy political cloud that’s descended on Capitol Hill. And it represents a new phase for Cantor, who has spent the bulk of 2012 working across the aisle on small-bore legislation, avoiding the rough-and-tumble of political gamesmanship.

Cantor was more open than usual in discussing the prospects of an all-Republican Washington in 2013, one with a narrow Senate majority and Romney in the White House. He said Republicans could bypass the Senate’s cumbersome filibuster requirements “to fix the problem” of the nation’s finances by using the “reconciliation” process on tax bills, which require only a simple Senate majority.

“I definitely think that is a challenge, because it depends how strong those 52 votes are in the Senate,” he said, answering a hypothetical about a two-seat Senate majority. “I think that we’ve learned by what the Democrats did when they came in and controlled everything, we’ve also learned by the years in which we controlled everything, that you have to have an open process. You have to allow for all sides to have their say. And I think that what we would try to do is, we would set up a reconciliation process to fix the problem.”

Of course, Republicans are preparing for the Supreme Court’s health care ruling. If the law is overturned, Cantor said the party will have legislation ready.